Michael set down his coffee cup. “All right,” he said, “Let's talk about our relationship. Why the fuck not? Sex in the fucking City, isn't that right?”
I lashed out at him. He caught my wrist, and pulled me into him, his smile all gone.
“Don't do that again.”
“You're threatening me now?”
“I'm telling you I don't like being hit.”
I shoved at him, pinning him against the wall of the booth. “And I'm telling you I'm not the kind of girl who goes to bed with a man just because he tells her to,” I hissed. “I don't want this to be just about the sex, but you're acting as if it is.”
“Oh, I don't think you have to worry about that.” He smiled up at me. It wasn't a nice smile. “We spend more time fighting than fucking. But the hate-sex is pretty amazing, now that I think about it. I saw a bathroom over there. Maybe I'll do you against the wall. You know, since it's all about the sex.”
“You're an asshole.” I struggled to free my wrist, fully intending to run all the way back to the hotel without stopping, and he squeezed me right up against him. “Cut that out.”
This close, I could make out the smudges beneath his eyes, and the faintest network of lines around his mouth. He was only twenty-five. He looked so much older.
“Bastard.”
Michael shook his head. “What's gotten your panties in a twist, hmm? What exactly do you want from me that you don't feel you're getting?”
“Respect.”
“You have it.”
“Really.” I could not hide my skepticism. I stared pointedly at my wrist, which he was still holding. He followed my gaze, opened his hand.
“If I didn't respect you, you'd be out on the curb with a bus ticket that I didn't pay for.”
“How charming,” I said flatly. “Thank you for that imagery. Have you done that before, then?”
“I don't fuck and tell.”
“Very convenient. What about love?” I said it with a challenge in my voice.
“You have that too,” he said coldly. “Or do you think I let every woman talk to me the way you do? No, darlin, you have me right where you want me, and you fucking know it. We both fucking know it.”
“Then why don't you act like it?”
His lip curled. “Subservient?”
“I meant, why are you always grabbing at me, and treating me like you think I'm an idiot?”
“Because sometimes you are an idiot, and because you might bolt. And then I'd have to chase you, and we'd just end up fighting and fucking, same as before. I figure this saves us a whole lot of trouble.”
“That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.” The sad thing was, he probably considered that a valid excuse.
Michael rolled his eyes. “I told you before, I don't do valentines or any of that Hallmark bullshit. If you're holding your breath for some sort of Disney ending the only thing you're going to get is blue.”
“What am I to you then?”
“You're my lover. If you mean am I fucking other women on the side, no. If you don't believe me I can get you a blood test, and show you I'm clean. But don't you go sticking me with any of this inane Catholic shit. Guilt and mental flagellation. No fucking thanks. Life is short enough as is. I'd much rather have a good time than spend it prostrating myself before a god that may or may not exist.”
“How dare you — ”
“Go say a Hail Mary. You'll be fine. God's not going to send you to hell for listening to an atheist, though he might smite you a little for fucking one. Stop acting so helpless, though. You think the BN are going to put up with your shit the way I do? Mais non, they will not. You'll get eaten alive down there with this little damsel in distress act of yours. I'm doing you a favor, really. Think of this as emotional boot camp.”
“I can take care of myself,” I said hotly. “I don't need your brand of help.”
Michael guffawed. “Darlin, you don't even know how to pleasure yourself.”
Oh my God. I looked around, making sure nobody was around to overheard our circumspect conversation. Michael watched me, looking amused.
“C'est mignon. That embarrasses you? I've been doing it since I was thirteen.”
Thirteen? Thirteen? At thirteen I still played with dolls. “I don't want to hear about your childhood sexcapades.”
He snorted. “I better not ask you about fetishes then, or you might just die from the shame.”
Passages from the more obscene parts of my mother's romance novels came to mind. I recalled them with horror. “That's sick,” I hissed. “No way are you going to tie me up and spank me, you pervert.”
He laughed again, not quite as meanly. It was still annoying. “You've been reading too many shitty books.”
“They weren't mine,” I snapped.
“I bet they weren't, you naughty girl.” He ran his hand up my leg. “We both know you can be dirty. What's a little more? I dream about you, Christina. I could tell you what you're wearing. What you're doing.”
I swallowed hard. “Here? No.”
“That's what makes it fun. That's what makes it wrong.” His whisper sent a tremor through me. “And that's what makes it right.”
“No.” I shook my head slowly. “No — ”
“Short skirt,” he said, in that low voice. “Real short. When you bend over, that's when I see you're not wearing anything beneath it, though I kind of suspected from the way it molds to your ass.”
“Michael, stop it.”
“You're wearing a tiny white blouse. Most of the buttons are already undone. You haven't got anything on under that, either. Around your throat is a striped tie. It was in a bow, earlier, before I unwrapped you just like a little present. You're going to tie me up with it.”
My jaw dropped. “You like being tied up?”
“Most men do. They're just too chickenshit to ask for what they want. But I know what I want. And I'm not afraid to ask for it. It's just a matter of finding the woman who can give it to me just the way I want.”
Chapter Three
Uncertainty
Michael
I knew what I wanted, all right. Getting it, that was the problem. I'd finally gotten her into my bed and now she was ready to leap out of it again.
Despite my conservative prognostications, I had a pretty good hunch that the BN would take her despite her doubts and my reservations.
Like I pointed out to her, she was the daughter of an infamous hacker who had broken into one of the most powerful non-government-affiliated agencies around. The raw talent was there. The BN would want to harness any latent abilities she possessed rather than let her fall into the wrong hands and be used against them.
No, she had the potential to be a weapon and the BN would use her like one.
What would happen to her — the real her — in the process of that transformation, I didn't know.
I had an idea what it was like, being a weapon that was self-aware. It changed the way you thought about the world. Had to. You'd go crazy otherwise.
I didn't want to see that happen to Christina.
We walked back to the hotel in silence. Silent as you can get in a city like San Francisco, where there's a constant loop of background noise. Honking cars. Gulls. Wind. The roar of traffic. A million conversations being carried on at once.
It's the equivalent of taking all the paints in a box and mixing every single one of the colors together.
And not at all silent.
Once we got back to the room Christina collapsed on the freshly made-up bed. Her guarded posture made it clear that this wasn't an open invitation. She shouldn't've bothered. I know when I'm not welcome.
Minutes ticked by. Her breathing slowed. I opened the fridge and poured myself a shot of something. Her breathing deepened, broken up by intermittent snuffles and snorts. I sat in the desk chair backwards, straddling it with my thighs. It was too early to be drinking probably, but I didn't care.
It was five o' clock somewhere in the wor
ld.
Her breasts rose and fell. The sweatshirt was only half-zipped, framing her cleavage. I watched her breathe as I sipped the rum, and sighed when I set down the glass. What a fucking mess we were.
Oh, who the fuck was I kidding? I was the mess. She was Little Miss Perfect, aspiring saint.
I kicked off my jeans and pulled on the sweats. Then I stripped down to my wifebeater. The alcohol had made me feel kind of hot and the room was humid. One of the maids had left the door to the balcony open a crack, letting in the stifling air.
Possibly to air out the room a little so it wouldn't smell like chemicals when we got back. Just in case, I did a sweep of the premises. I didn't find any bugs. None that were readily visible to the naked eye.
That didn't mean there weren't any, but it made me feel like I'd fucking tried. I started to our another shot. Stopped. How much had I had today? Too much.
I pushed the bottle away. My headache had returned. I was trying to figure out whether it was because of the espresso, if I'd had too much or too little, or if it was due to something unrelated, when my phone rang. In my jeans pocket. Across the room.
I got up and slid it free, cursing when I saw the number on the display. I darted a look at the sleeping Christina and then stepped out onto the balcony through the door I'd just closed.
I covered my ear with one hand, the better to filter out the white noise from the city down below. “What do you want, Callaghan?”
“I heard you had a run-in with some old friends of ours.”
So he wasn't calling to gloat, he was probing for information. Or maybe it's both. I curled my lip. “Were you the one who invited them over?”
“Now you just sound paranoid, Michael.”
“It's not paranoia if there really is someone out to get you,” I said. “Then it's called working for you.”
“There is wit, and there is bravado. You seem to think they are interchangeable, but they are not. It takes a fine eye to spot the cracks in the facade, but I know. You're as rattled as a bug in a bottle.”
Colorful imagery. “What do you want?”
“Did you identify and address the leak?”
“Are you talking about our corporate mole? Jesus fucking Christ. It's been weeks and you mean to tell me you haven't done a damn thing this whole time? What have you been doing? Sitting with your thumb up your asshole?”
“Just answer the question.”
“Villanueva. The Sniper. Or whatever the fuck his real name is. I don't know. But I bet you do. You knew all along, didn't you? Ever since that first phone call.”
“I had a hunch.”
I felt the anger creeping back up on me. Like I wouldn't mind putting the bad hurt on someone. “Which you did absolutely nothing about.”
“I didn't know how deeply his hatred of you and the girl ran.”
“Oh, were you hoping he'd finish the job for you? He put hundreds of innocent lives at risk in the process.” That was a mistake. This bastard didn't give a shit about life. “He put the organization he worked for into jeopardy the moment he decided to make such high-risk decisions so rashly.”
“Aye, he's created quite the mess.”
“Understatement of the fucking century. And you're real familiar with that, aren't you, sir? Death and destruction. Yeah. Some mess.”
Adrian Callaghan had been my instructor as a recruit fresh off the streets. I've never been what you might call squeamish. But even me, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, in a town that was full of wrong sides of the track, could feel disgust at a man who took sexual gratification from suffering.
I'd told Christina the gist of the story, about what had happened between us. How Callaghan had turned on me during training. How he'd decided he was going to carve me up like Christmas dinner in order to put me in what he considered my place.
What I didn't tell her was that, when he'd gutted me and my intestines were hanging like garlands festooned around my abdomen — when I'd been so weak from blood loss that it was all I could do to crawl to the ER — he'd been sporting a massive hard-on in those fucking khaki slacks of his.
“What are you going to do? Give the fucking Sniper a gold star on his progress report?”
“I do not tolerate meddling in my affairs. I made it quite clear that you and the girl are to be handled at my discretion — and mine alone.”
A drop of sweat ran down my spine and soaked into my waistband. I propped my elbow against the railing, twisting my body to expose myself to the cool bay breeze. “You two were fighting over me? I'm so flattered.”
“I have no use for a man who cannot follow simple instructions. You would do to remember that.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“You have exactly forty-eight hours to check into the nearest base starting now.”
The line disconnected.
I considered throwing the phone off the balcony. Staying to watch it smash on the pavement below and then taking the girl and what cash we had left and making a run for it. Maybe heading out to sea.
I folded up the phone and headed back inside.
Christina was still asleep. I was more awake than I wanted to be. I studied the bottle of liquor on the desk, picked up the shot glass, then, after a moment's thought, set it back down. Fuck it. Fuck everything. Fuck Adrian Callaghan.
I went to the armchair in the corner of the room and cranked the seat back until I got comfortable. The bottle of rum went with me, and I drank right out of the neck of the bottle until I fell asleep.
Christina
Another day went by with no word from the BN. My doubts were gaining substance, becoming less nebulous and more like actual impediments: much harder to brush away or ignore. Now it took effort.
The liquor in the mini-fridge was disappearing at a rather alarming rate, too. There were two bottles in the trash when I woke up that morning.
Michael did not appear concerned by either matter. He did get annoyed when I came to him with my doubts, and I wasn't sure how to confront him about the issue of the alcohol without sounding like a bitch. Easier to stay quiet and say nothing at all.
But what kind of a way was that to deal with your problems?
Michael was acting very coolly towards me, though I'd woken up in bed that morning with his arms wrapped around me. The scent of alcohol had been all over him, in his pores, on his breath. He didn't explain himself or apologize or give me any reason as to why he smelled like a distillery. He just rolled out of bed to shower and get dressed.
As we left the room Michael plucked a hair from his head and carefully wedged it into the jamb before locking up. He caught me watching him, and a line formed between his eyebrows.
“Until your new boss calls back to make it official, we're not out of the red yet.”
Why was he making it sound like it was my fault?
“I know that. It's just…I saw that in a movie once. Does that really work?”
“Yes,” he said briefly. “And even if you are hired by the BN, we might still be in danger. Who the hell knows how these power struggles turn out? All I know is, I don't want any more men with tranq guns getting into our room.”
Michael was referring to the man who had broken into the room and drugged us less than a week before. We had then been brought to an unused warehouse, where we came to tied to a chair. The Sniper had rigged it to explode with the intention of killing us both. We had barely escaped.
“No tranquilizers sounds good,” I said.
“Sure beats being doped up like a lion on safari.” He put his hand at the base of my spine. I was uncertain whether this was a warning or a show of affection and looked at him curiously.
“Act normally,” he said.
Ah, it was a warning. How refreshing. “What is normal?”
“I'll tell you what it's not. You staring at me like you expect me to grow horns or a tail.”
I shook my head and headed for the elevators.
“Not that way,” he said sharply. “Never
take the elevators. Not if you can help it. It's too easy to be trapped if something goes wrong. Then it becomes your coffin.”
I'd taken the elevators in the office building across the city when we went to see Kent, though. I almost had been trapped, but if I hadn't taken the elevators and seen those bombers, all three of us might have died instead of just Kent.
You're not always right, I wanted to tell him. But Kent's building wasn't the best example to use at the moment because I had been the one who had enabled the Sniper to track us there in the first place.
Michael had taken Kent's death hard. He was the closest thing to a father figure in Michael's life and it was partly my fault he had been killed. Bad idea to bring it up now, when he was mad at me.
The stairs were hidden behind a fire door, though it wasn't alarmed. The steps and walls looked as if they had been made of poured concrete, forming an unintentional acoustic chamber. I could hear muted conversations from other floors, the muffled roar of a vacuum. “I guess most people don't take the stairs.”
“I guess not,” said Michael.
I was very conscious of his warm body beneath the cotton shirt. His hand on my back burned like a brand and I could feel the hard muscle in his side flex with each step.
His fingers moved, stroking gently, and when I looked up it was to see him watching me, stark appraisal in his dark green eyes. “What are you — ”
He kissed me.
He kissed me, and he tasted like alcohol and the minty toothpaste he'd used to ineffectively cover up the smell of the former on his breath. It made me feel slightly ill. Or maybe that was just him. The way Michael kissed, a girl could forget her own name.
His other hand snaked around my waist as he deepened it, pulling me tightly against him as his tongue wound its way into my mouth. His callused palm had slipped under the gap between my shirt and my jeans, and was now rasping against bare skin.
The murmurings I'd heard before grew louder. I opened an eye to see an older couple squeeze past us, grumbling a little at the detour and the fact that young people these days had no sense of propriety.
Michael pulled his hand back out from beneath my shirt, tilting his head to watch the couple leave. They must have passed inspection. He turned around to kiss me again, just a peck this time. As though in apology for what he had just made painfully clear.
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